Covering the whole development process for the global biotechnology industry

Bioprocessing begins upstream, most often with culturing of animal or microbial cells in a range of vessel types (such as bags or stirred tanks) using different controlled feeding, aerating, and process strategies.

Beginning with harvest of material from a bioreactor, downstream processing removes or reduces contaminants to acceptable levels through several steps that typically include centrifugation, filtration, and/or chromatographic technologies.

Drug products combine active pharmaceutical ingredients with excipients in a final formulation for delivery to patients in liquid or lyophilized (freeze-dried) packaged forms — with the latter requiring reconstitution in the clinical setting.

Many technologies are used to characterize biological products, manufacturing processes, and raw materials. The number of options and applications is growing every day — with quality by design (QbD) giving impetus to this expansion.

Even as it matures, the biopharmaceutical industry is still a highly entrepreneurial one. Partnerships of many kinds — from outsourcing to licensing agreements to consultancies — help companies navigate this increasingly global business environment.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018 Daily Archives

In biomanufacturing, a production scale change is required to either meet the market growth demand or when a product moves from clinical to commercial manufacturing. How that volume is increased depends on whether a scale up or scale out philosophy is used. The industry standard has been to scale up, which translates to increasing the size of the bioreactors used in manufacturing runs. However, due to the recent availability and ease of single-use technologies, coupled with improvements in cell culture…